Challenging History: Race, Equity, and the Practice of Public History

By Rachel Clare Donaldson and John W. White

A collection of essays that examine how the history of slavery and race in the United States has been interpreted and inserted at public historic sites

For decades racism and social inequity have stayed at the center of the national conversation in the United States, sustaining the debate around public historic places and monuments and what they represent. These conversations are a reminder of the crucial role that public history professionals play in engaging public audiences on subjects of race and slavery. This "difficult history" has often remained un- or underexplored in our public discourse, hidden from view by the tourism industry, or even by public history professionals themselves, as they created historic sites, museums, and public squares based on white-centric interpretations of history and heritage.

Challenging History, through a collection of essays by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, examines how difficult histories, specifically those of slavery and race in the United States, are being interpreted and inserted at public history sites and in public history work. Several essays explore the successes and challenges of recent projects, while others discuss gaps that public historians can fill at sites where Black history took place but is absent in the interpretation. Through case studies, the contributors reveal the entrenched false narratives that public history workers are countering in established public history spaces and the work they are conducting to reorient our collective understanding of the past.

History practitioners help the public better understand the world. Their choices help to shape ideas about heritage and historical remembrances and can reform, even transform, worldviews through more inclusive and ethically narrated histories. Challenging History invites public historians to consider the ethical implications of the narratives they choose to share and makes the case that an inclusive, honest, and complete portrayal of the past has the potential to reshape collective memory and ideas about the meaning of American history and citizenship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643362014

Book preview

Challenging History

THE CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

Sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World of the College of Charleston

Crossings and Encounters: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Atlantic World

Laura R. Prieto and Stephen R. Berry, eds.

Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas

John Garrison Marks

Material Culture in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean

David S. Shields, ed.

Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World

Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds.

Challenging HISTORY

Race, Equity, and the Practice of Public History

Edited by

LEAH WORTHINGTON, RACHEL CLARE DONALDSON, and JOHN W. WHITE

© 2021 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN: 978-1-64336-200-7 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64336-201-4 (ebook)

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by the generous support of The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and the College of Charleston Libraries.

Front cover photographs: Old Slave Market Museum, Charleston, SC, © 123rf.com/James Kirkikis; and 1852 broadside, courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, SC

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Leah Worthington, John W. White, and Rachel Clare Donaldson

PART I: FINDING NEW STORIES

They Wore White and Prayed to the East: The Material Legacy of Enslaved Muslims in Early America

Ayla Amon

More Than Just a Way across the Water: The Identification, Preservation, and Commemoration of Ferry Sites in South Carolina

Edward Salo

Power, Representation, and Memory in the Great Dismal Swamp

Kathryn Benjamin Golden

PART II: SEEKING COLLABORATIONS

Hidden in Plain Sight: Contested Histories and Urban Slavery in Mississippi

Jodi Skipper

Creating and Maintaining Digital Public History: The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative

Leah Worthington

PART III: THINKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

The Ansonborough Project: Lessons in Historic Preservation

Ashley Hollinshead

A Thin Neck in the Hourglass: Looking Back at Charleston Harbor from Colorado … and Looking Forward

Peter H. Wood

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

Runaway notice for Mahomet from the Georgia Gazette

List of the Owen family, mislabeled The Lord’s Prayer

Amulet created by a Muslim priest enslaved in Léogâne, Saint-Domingue

Copper charm found during excavations of Fort Shirley

Display cases discussing the development of the transatlantic slave trade

Portrait of Omar ibn Sayyid

Case displaying the religious traditions practiced by the enslaved

Ferry on the Ashley River

Black Charlestonians beside John C. Calhoun monument (1892)

Peter H. Wood with students at Nevin Platt Middle School

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative

Introduction

LEAH WORTHINGTON, JOHN W. WHITE, and RACHEL CLARE DONALDSON

In the spring of 2020, with tension related to the COVID-19 pandemic already at a low-voltage hum across the United States, cities and towns quickly became electrified when protests broke out responding to the mistreatment and murder of Black Americans. A July 3, 2020, New York Times article, Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History, calculated that more than 4,700 demonstrations took place between the day of the first protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 26, and the date of the article, on July 3, averaging 140 demonstrations per day. The article cited national polls on the number of Americans who participated in these protests, with the lowest of these figures coming in at fifteen million people: 6 percent of the US population.¹ Tensions and outrage increased not only in the streets of US cities but also in the news and on social media as Americans expressed their views on the uprisings. Media and individual views ranged from complete support of social justice for Black Americans and of the Black Lives Matter movement at the one end of the spectrum to historically false and blatantly racist comments at the other end. As conversations about race and the legacy of slavery sprang up, it was evident that many Americans’ knowledge of the country’s history is underinformed, uninformed, and simply incorrect.

This moment in American history is connected to our profession as scholars of public history, serving as a reminder of how much work there is left to accomplish in helping Americans learn their national and local histories, particularly the difficult histories about slavery and race. With the rising national interest in learning about African American and other marginalized people’s histories, the moment also created an opportunity that public historians can build upon. According to a June 2020 Pew Research Center poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans reported that they had a conversation about race or racial inequality in the last month. In addition to conversations among family and friends, this moment also led many institutions and businesses to publicly announce their commitment to racial and social justice. Although public calls for antiracism increased and dominated some news outlets and social media accounts over the spring and summer of 2020, the United States has also seen a 55 percent increase in white-nationalist hate groups since 2017, according to Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 Year in Hate and Extremism report.² One of the ways that white-nationalist groups spread racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia is through historical falsehoods. Furthermore, when difficult or painful histories are hidden from the public by the tourism industry or public history professionals, the public not only receives incorrect or fractured history but also internalizes misconceptions, myths, and falsehoods used to prop up American racism.

Although the 2020 moment of racial reckoning has caught the nation’s attention, many public history professionals have long contended with the necessity of creating racially inclusive and accurate history for the public. Therefore, whereas the 2020 national events have drawn fresh attention to Black and other marginalized histories, this volume provides examples of how this work is already taking place, along with the successes and challenges of those projects, and it identifies where further work needs to be conducted. For readers who are engaged in similar projects, this volume provides an opportunity to put your work and ideas in conversation with those of other public history professionals who are engaged in Black-centered public history. It also offers ideas on spaces where Black-centered narratives need to be implemented, pointing the way to new directions in the field.

The work conducted by the authors herein has several origins. Some authors write about historical topics presently underused at public history sites, calling for new interpretation and projects; several authors fit their projects into existing public history projects or museum spaces, either adding new Black voices to African American narratives or inserting Black voices into narratives that had been ignoring them; still others’ work resulted, in part, as a response to current events. This volume’s origin, in fact, began with a conference in Charleston, South Carolina, organized as a direct response to the racist massacre of Black people in a Black Charleston church.

In 2017 scholars from Europe, the Caribbean, and across the United States came to Charleston for the public history conference Transforming Public History: From Charleston to the Atlantic World.³ Through presentations, workshops, and conversations at the conference, it became apparent that the challenges and successes that public history professionals see in Charleston and the Atlantic world are also experienced throughout the US South. The conference included a wide geographic scope, and this volume began to evolve, focusing on practitioners and academics collaborating on research and projects within the United States, with a concentration in Charleston. As an outgrowth of the conference, the volume reflects the themes of the conference by focusing on public history and the representations and absences of underrepresented, ignored, or nearly erased African American histories. Inclusive of research and public history projects at all stages of progress, these essays explore untapped spaces of interpretation, newer voices and narratives presently being explored, collaborative projects that challenge entrenched mythologies and heritages built on falsehoods, and established projects that can serve as models for practitioners.

A reflection of the breadth of the field of public history, the volume’s contributors have been serving in many different public history roles. Our hope is that the variable methods of involvement in public history will translate to being useful to a broad audience of practitioners and students who are also thinking about inclusive public history that centers on underrepresented narratives. This volume tackles topics and cases crossing into related fields such as museum studies, historic preservation, archaeology, African American studies, collective memory studies, and digital history. Therefore, it also represents an assortment of public history sites, including museums, federal and state parks, public squares, neighborhoods, the internet, sites of slavery, and historic homes. The volume’s editors and authors include academic public historians working on public history projects, scholars with academic appointments who have taken an active role in public history projects, librarians working on digital public history, museum workers, and interpreters working at historic sites. Regardless of the type of public history space, each essay speaks to the changes and continuities in creating history for the public in the US South over the past decades.

In gathering the voices of public history practitioners working on southern history into one volume, it becomes clear that twenty-first-century practitioners are contending with entrenched ideas created by the dominant culture about identity and heritage that were developed in previous centuries and are evolving in the twenty-first century. True of United States history regardless of region, the effects of racism in the South did not stop with schools, housing, job opportunities, or voting. The work of public history practitioners in this volume underscores the increasingly acknowledged reality among both the public and historic sites that racism has also influenced, and at times outright controlled, the history told in many of the South’s public spaces and private tourism spaces. Designed for tourists and locals alike, the spaces where collective memory and remembrance are formed that have historically excluded Black history include museums, historic sites, historic homes, monuments, and plaques.

White heritage and identity—regularly overlaid with ideological white supremacy—have dominated many southern landscapes and prevented profoundly important African American experiences from being told in the spaces where the history took place.⁴ The southern plantation is ground zero for this occurrence: spaces where US dominant collective memory has been mythologized and romanticized, despite the reality that plantation history is the history of white people’s violent, racist enslavement of Black people for their labor.

The decades of work on the part of public history workers and educators to share accurate American plantation history have recently begun changing public perceptions regarding historic plantations. Redesigned in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as elite spaces with natural beauty and elegant architecture and stripped of their terrifying and painful histories, plantations have been—and often remain—popular sites for weddings. However, as more sites of slavery tell the actual history of plantations, Americans’ popular opinion is shifting about how the sites should be used. As the public comes to understand the seriousness of the history that took place on plantations, some couples are deciding to celebrate their marriage elsewhere, with a few publicly expressing regret for having chosen a plantation for their wedding. For example, actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively issued a statement of regret about holding their wedding on a South Carolina plantation, noting that the difference between the romantic website version of the wedding venue and the actual history of the site is impossible to reconcile.⁵ A 2019 New York Times article reported that major wedding-planning websites were cutting back on promoting historic plantation sites from their sites. Although the changes made on wedding-planning websites included removing all references to plantations on their sites and prohibiting adjectives like ‘charming’ to describe venues where Americans’ ancestors were once enslaved, tortured, and raped, some of the websites still have sites of slavery listed as wedding venues, and weddings continue to take place regularly on historic plantations.⁶ These changes in public opinion, though incomplete, indicate that public historians can play a part in shifting Americans’ perceptions of not only plantation history but also their collective memory about African American history and other underrepresented narratives.

Historic plantations are one of the most severe examples of a dominant white culture blotting out painful historical realities and then replacing them with self-serving myths. However, in nearly all public history spaces the enduring effects of the dominance of white-controlled history, heritage, and identity have affected the interpretation of historic sites, museums, and public squares. Therefore, this volume explores the changes that public history practitioners are making in southern spaces as they reinsert or center the histories that have previously been purposefully hidden or simply ignored by dominant American culture. These changes in interpretation and focus act as a corrective in public history spaces historically dominated by falsehoods cloaked as fact, which have been subsequently—and dangerously—absorbed as fact by the dominant collective memory of the United States.

Because there is no one-size-fits-all solution applicable to public history spaces that have excluded or continue to exclude African American voices, this volume does create a space to discuss the state of public history challenges and successes in the South. Each essay reveals how public history professionals’ method of including Black voices varies depending on a list of local circumstances, including the history of the institution, the permanency of the project, funding, and established research. In examining case studies of different projects and histories, we hope to spark new conversations and add to established ones not only in the US South but also throughout the nation about accurate and inclusive history for the public. In any place with underrepresented or silenced voices, or any historic site where the narrative represents only a homogenous voice, the themes found in this volume offer models of investigating and implementing inclusive and engaging history for the public.

The work of public history practitioners and scholars in this volume is underpinned by several themes: the interplay between and imbalanced representations of hegemonic versus marginalized identities; the challenge and necessity of replacing romanticized myths with difficult historical realities; and the role of race, class, and imagined heritages in creating collective remembrances. In a few instances, nearly erasing people and overlooking material culture in the historical record and landscape has resulted in potential projects and exhibitions that are early in the process of rewriting interpretation or establishing collaborative partnerships. Other essays offer reflections on changes in public history or collective memory over time, revealing lessons learned and insights for future work. Implicit in these essays is the knowledge that the ideological perspectives of all individuals working at historic sites or archaeology sites, in museums or historic homes, create bias and affect the content that the public learns in that space and, in turn, affect how the public then creates its collective remembrance of a place, people, or history. This volume calls for readers to think about the biases within their collaborative teams as much as within their audience and acknowledge how bias, institutional racism, and systemic racism restrain, distort, or refuse to create public history that is inclusive of African American or other marginalized voices. The essays in this volume present the ways in which changes to the dominant narrative have the potential to reshape collective memory and ideas about American history and heritage.

The approaches to resolve falsehoods or tensions regarding African American representation vary across the essays based on specific factors related to their site or project, including the cast of collaborators, how long the historic site has been open to the public, and the public’s relationship to the history being presented. Collaborators range from museum professionals and scholars to community members and private owners of historic homes. Other contributors are ultimately identifying new historical actors for the public or seeking collaborative ways to change interpretation at sites currently overlooking nondominant histories and people. The contributors’ projects also include collaborators whose interest and/or connection to underrepresented histories varies. The collaborators include docents, volunteers, graduate and undergraduate students, scholarly collaborators, and institutional leadership. As works by public history professionals or students, these essays remind us of the reality that project collaborators vary in their knowledge of or enthusiasm for the goal of elevating Black voices in public history. Therefore, the education of docents, student workers, and other project members is part of the discussion of some projects in this volume.

The Difficult Past and Imagined Heritages

Whether reading exhibit text, listening to a guided tour, or walking around a nature preserve with wayside signs, visitors bring their identities with them, which include seeing the world and absorbing new information through complex lenses of imagined communities and imagined heritages they chose for themselves. Therefore, in addition to working through our own biases, including the presence of previously unacknowledged prejudice and racist ideas, public history professionals who share the history of underrepresented peoples also have to navigate the biases of the local public, institutional board members, local officials, and tourists. Because American exceptionalism has historically allowed the United States to claim itself as a nation born inherently good and as the protector of the free world, many white Americans enter public history spaces with the idea that the American history presented to them will reflect the values they have internalized as American. The idea that one’s nation is inherently different and superior is, of course, a dangerous way to self-recognize, for it allows and encourages blindness toward painful and difficult past historical realities and their connections to the present. Furthermore, US history is full of examples of suppression, oppression, and enslavement, particularly when this history involves Black people or other marginalized groups. By ensuring that we understand the complex ways Americans accept and deny present and past race relations, we can better prepare for bringing Black stories to the US public.

One effect that a dominant imagined community, such as southerners, has on dominant collective memory is the lack of space they have historically allowed for telling difficult histories in public places. In Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites, Julie Rose describes difficult history as historical narratives that disrupt people’s sense of identity and can therefore act as a psychological obstruction to accepting information that threatens or conflicts with their sense of self.⁷ In the United States, histories of human suffering, then, particularly the suffering that one group inflicts on another—slavery, for example—have historically been removed or barely mentioned in public history spaces where they took place because those histories are tied to present-day local, regional, and national identities of dominant white groups. White-controlled collective memory continues to demand that we discuss only the positive aspects of American history. Hegemonic forces do not limit their attempt to control historical narratives to public history spaces, though, making the work of public historians even more challenging. As the US protests demanding race and social justice carried on through the 2020 summer, President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools using the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1619 Project curriculum, considering the curriculum un-American.⁸ The 1619 Project centers slavery and its legacy in American history.

It is not only in the South, then, but rather in all of the United States that slavery and its legacy are contested issues, particularly among whites. An October 2019 AP-NORC poll showed that although 54 percent of white Americans believe that the history of slavery affects Black people today, 64 percent of white Americans also oppose a public apology for slavery from the US government.⁹ Whereas more than half were willing to admit that slavery has had a lasting legacy, most whites do not want a public apology that would result in admitting that slavery was wrong. With whites being the racial majority in the United States, they account for the largest number of public history practitioners and workers. This volume adds to literature illuminating the historical effect of this situation in the present, and it asks public history workers and the public to interrogate how dominant collective memory and imagined heritages are operating internally in their institution or project and externally in their public audience.¹⁰

The AP-NORC poll data support the anecdotal experiences of interpretive aids at sites of slavery (former plantations) in and around Charleston, where interpreters encounter the thoughts of white locals and tourists firsthand. As interpreters share with one another statements heard from all visitors, it is white audiences who reveal to the interpretive guide their unwillingness to face historical realities about slavery. Interpreters are regularly challenged by whites with statements insisting that slavery was not that bad, claiming that some plantation owners were nice to their slaves, and other statements that function as restraints or filters that white Americans use to form their collective memory about slavery. These restraints imposed by white visitors falsely limit the suffering that whites have historically inflicted on Blacks in the United States.¹¹ Part of the work, then, is correcting these comments and ideas in the moment to demand that historical facts, not self-serving falsehoods, are the foundation of the narrative.

This familiar conversation among interpreters was galvanized in the dark humor of Azie Mira Dungey’s comedy web series Ask a Slave, where Dungey reveals the way in which white tourists’ questions betray a basic ignorance about the history of slavery in the United States.¹² While working as a first-person interpreter at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, she regularly encountered questions that proved many Americans’ ignorance about the facts of American slavery. In the series Dungey created the character Lizzie May, a woman enslaved by the Washington family who is used by Dungey to recreate uninformed and absurd visitor interactions, explaining to Lizzy May, for example, that slavery was a good life with room and board or asking why Lizzy May did not simply take the Underground Railroad out of slavery.¹³ The visitors to Mount Vernon, like the tourists visiting Charleston and other southern cities, are from all over the country, and Black and marginalized people have histories that span the United States from coast to coast. Therefore, although this volume focuses on public history practiced in the South, the implications of presenting Black and other marginalized histories to the public should be considered by all pubic history practitioners in the United States. In different ways all Americans struggle with and would benefit from an increase in public history addressing slavery, its legacy, African American history, and their local histories of marginalized people.

In Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond, Sharon Macdonald notes that a history once seen as a sign of a country’s achievement may later come to be understood as a reason for regret.¹⁴ This leaves public history spaces as a venue to change an accepted dominant collective memory about a contested past and change the public’s response to confronting a past inclusive of difficult heritage, particularly when the public is in a phase of transition, ranges from appreciation to outrage. Online reviews of angry